[Starlight] Parries + Ranged Combat (Patreon)

secretly i had both of these done two days ago because i guess i know how to program a little bit or something, but really, just a little bit ok?

parries first.
last time we talked about crits, and how crits give you a chance to double damage of an attack if you hit a certain part of the hitblock. just as i'm going through testing this, i feel like the inclusion of the crit block already makes combat feel a lot better because it's providing a chance to make a decision in the fray of combat about whether you risk going for the crit. unfortunately, that only applies to attacking, leaving defense somewhat lacking, right? wrong-- parries.

parries are basically a critical dodge. when defending, they operate in the same way but instead of doubling damage they reverse the track for one attack allowing the defender to sneak in a hit on the non-offensive stage. 

on the other hand, when attacking, there's now a risk of being parried. marked by a dark red block, if the player happens to 'miss' an attack in the parry zone, then the opponent gets the attack chance instead. 

below you can see this in motion. in the first part, playing as the left side, i hit the parry zone of the second blockgroup. the enemy takes one attack, i dodge it, i land the third hit. the enemy counter attacks, i parry the first hit, and strike back.

casual reminder that i need to redo all these animations anyway and they're not final.
the transitions between counter/attacks and parries is also visually nonexistent right now but that is a thing that will definitely be fixed later. we'll make a quick and flashy ritual animation for it, but what's important right now is that it works.

as for ranged combat, ranged offense is somewhat unique and has yet to be done, but will be the next thing i do... so this mainly applies to ranged defense. counterattacks and parries have both been fixed so enemies can no longer hit back from an inappropriate range. the combat scene has also been adjusted to account for different ranges of combat.

here we see the scene with the units in combat with a range of 2. 

...and here is with a range of 3. 

the camera starts on the attacker and moves to the target. the background also moves with it but i've disabled that for this preview since i don't have a looping background yet.

further more, there is an extra visual delay on damage animations set up for ranged attacks to account for projectile timing. both the projectile delay and the scene pan are also already set up to scale with any amount of distance, so attacking from 2 spaces away will naturally look and feel closer than attacking from 5 spaces away.

if what i want to do works out, ranged offense is going to be unique for the player, and that's what's up next. that one is probably going to take more effort, but then i've thought all of the mechanics i've done so far would take more effort and yet these have gone so easily... who truly knows?
i have been taking a break from programming to focus on some art, but, we'll see.

regardless, these two done does put us at 4/11 of the major implementations i outlined that need to be done... two weeks ago. so, you know, i'm happy with the pace. i feel like i don't get to say that often. i will relish in this.